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As ‘vassals’ of the Crown,* Indigenous people were theoretically protected from arbitrary enslavement, just as any Spanish citizen would be, but there were three important exceptions to the royal prohibition on slavery in the early years of colonisation. Indigenous people could be enslaved if they were ‘cannibals’; had been captured in a ‘just war’; or, as mentioned earlier, if they were subject to rescate (‘ransom’ from a worse fate, like human sacrifice, or being enslaved to a non-Christian). Significantly, also, only those from Spanish territories were protected by their ‘vassal’ status, meaning that anyone from beyond their borders (or whom the slaver claimed was from elsewhere) could be enslaved. These loopholes in the law meant that the debate over the subjection of Indigenous peoples was mainly focused not on whether slavery was wrong, but in what circumstances people had been, or could be, legally enslaved.

— On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock

Meanwhile, the popular image of early modern Europe remains an extraordinarily white, ruffed and cod-pieced Tudor and Golden Age fantasy, where Indigenous Americans, Africans and Asians existed only as ‘curiosities’ from distant lands. Scholars pointing out the ubiquity of people of colour in the European past are routinely denounced as politically correct historical revisionists, shaping the past to fit an idealised multicultural present. Even pseudo-historical fantasy universes replicate and reproduce this cultural homogeneity, which has become not just an issue of ignorance but also of politics. ‘Historical whiteness’ has become a battleground.

— On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock

The erasure and exclusion of Indigenous peoples is a fundamental part of national narratives across the world. The ‘Doctrine of Discovery’, a legal fiction that granted Europeans and their descendants the right to ‘discovered’ territories, has its roots in the fifteenth-century papal bulls that divided the world between Spain and Portugal, making Indigenous peoples ‘politically non-existent’. This doctrine has a powerful legacy in United States law, and patriotic myths are often framed around the ‘absence’ of Native Americans: discovery, the wilderness, the untamed frontier, the ‘opening’ of the West – these are compelling fantasies that deliberately erase Indigenous presence and set the scene for the settlement of empty lands by industrious ‘pioneers’. The violent displacement of Native peoples from their lands is obscured, and even their presence is blurred so that they become merely a distorted caricature in the origin story of the nation.

— On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock

If you see a train this evening, Far away against the sky, Lie down in your wooden blanket, Sleep, and let the train go by.

Trains have called us, every midnight, From a thousand miles away, Trains that pass through empty cities, Trains that have no place to stay.

No one drives the locomotive, No one tends the staring light, Trains have never needed riders, Trains belong to the bitter night.

Railway stations stand deserted, Rights of way lie clear and cold: What we left them, trains inherit, Trains go on, and we grow cold.

Let them cry like cheated lovers, Let their cries find only wind. Trains are meant for night and ruin. We are meant for song, and sin.

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, George Guidall (Narrator)